-Real World-
The Sky Screen had confirmed it obliquely, and Cake Island had assembled the pieces without much difficulty: Uchiha Izuna was the biological father of Charlotte Hikaru and Charlotte Alluka. Which made him their mother's future husband — a relationship that had apparently not required either party's informed consent to begin, and which had produced two of the most strategically significant children the Big Mom Pirates had added to the family in years.
The reactions across the island were, as usual, varied.
Charlotte Brûlée sat with her hands folded and turned the information over in a way that had a texture to it — not simple satisfaction, not simple grief, but the particular feeling of a woman who loved her brother more than she loved most things in the world and had been watching the confirmation assemble itself that the family's next chapter would be written by someone younger and more powerful than herself.
I can't help him become stronger. I never could. The thought was familiar. All I can do is help him go further.
She knew, because she had always known, that Katakuri's role in the family was to hold the line while everything else caught up. Charlotte Hikaru was the catching up. The youngest generation was surpassing the older one in ways that should have produced resentment and instead produced a tired kind of pride. She was glad the girl existed. She was allowed to also find it bittersweet.
The jealousy didn't last. It rarely did, for Charlotte Brûlée. She let it pass and returned to the more useful posture.
Charlotte Perospero had a different concern occupying him entirely.
"Caesar Clown gets a statue." He said it to the room with the particular tone of a man who has been swindled and is now watching the person who swindled him receive commemorative honors. "A several-hundred-meter bronze statue, at a university he founded, with a stone tablet listing his contributions to the Holy Roman Empire. This is the man who took Cake Island's giantization research funds and used them for his own weapons experiments."
No one disputed the sequence of events, because the Sky Screen had made them fairly clear. The partnership with Doflamingo had produced returns and Cake Island had seen none of it. The research investment had been redirected before any results could be shared. Caesar Clown had been, by every measurable standard, operating his own agenda on their funding.
"The books on that tablet," Charlotte Smoothie said, approaching it from a different angle. The Cosmological Constant. The Road to Serfdom. The Theory of Class. "Nobody here has read them, because they don't exist yet. The names alone suggest the first one is scientific — that fits with what we know of him. The other two sound like political theory. The Revolutionary Army will find those interesting."
"The Revolutionary Army will find those interesting," Charlotte Perospero agreed, with the tone of a man who was not a revolutionary. "Caesar Clown, writing the intellectual foundations of revolution, and being built statues for it by a future empire. I'm still working on making this make sense."
Charlotte Smoothie had a simpler feeling about it: regret that Punk Hazard had moved faster than she had. The moment Caesar Clown appeared on the Sky Screen, she should have led a team to Punk Hazard and taken him before the Marine transferred him. Talent was the most valuable resource in the world, and she had been slow. She filed the failure for future reference.
"The Marine didn't know what they had either," someone offered. This was true but not comforting.
The question of who Uchiha Izuna had given his eyes to occupied a separate thread of speculation. He had explicitly stated that the transplanted eyes in his current possession were not his originals — that he had given his own to his brother. A brother powerful enough to require that level of sacrifice. The brother who had enslaved Leviathan for years. A name that older members of the family had heard in fragments — Uchiha Madara — that the younger generation largely failed to connect to the Izuna they had just watched fishing inside a whale's stomach.
The information about chaotic time inside Leviathan's body had been absorbed and immediately dismissed by most of the audience as an interesting detail with no practical implications. It was easier to focus on the romance angle.
Enel, whose enthusiasm for the outer reaches of the universe had made him the figure most likely to actually use something called The Cosmological Constant if it ever materialized, was referenced briefly and set aside. The God of Development occupied his own category of problem.
"Regardless," Charlotte Perospero said, redirecting, "we have a wedding to prepare."
The wedding preparations had moved with the efficiency of a family that had considerable practice at events of scale. New clothes were needed for the groom. Cake Island's skilled tailors had been organized for this purpose, producing a suit appropriate for the occasion. The measurements were taken from a boy who was not participating in this process with any visible enthusiasm.
Kozuki Momonosuke had learned the truth of his situation earlier that day.
He stood in the center of a fitting room, surrounded by two retainers and a rotating cast of Charlotte siblings who were treating the whole thing as a cheerful logistical exercise, and processed the information with the expression of someone experiencing a philosophical emergency.
"I don't want to marry her." He said it once, clearly, with the conviction of a child who had opinions. Then he said it again, because it had not produced any change in the surrounding activity. "I don't want to marry her. Just kill me instead."
Kinemon and Kanjuro exchanged a look that contained a number of things, chief among them the recognition that there was nothing useful they could say. The Sweet Commanders of Cake Island had made their position clear through the simple mechanism of being present and large. The resistance available to Kozuki Momonosuke against the combined will of the Big Mom Pirates in their own territory was approximately none.
He had, originally, been engaged to Charlotte Smoothie on the Sky Screen — the daughter, a more age-adjacent arrangement, something a child could at least process as a concept. The real world had diverged from the Sky Screen in this as in other things. The daughter had not been the offer. The mother had made herself the offer. And the gap in age between Charlotte Linlin and Kozuki Momonosuke was approximately sixty years, which was not a gap that lent itself to any particular framing that made the boy feel better about it.
Charlotte Linlin, receiving the news in the central tower while working through a cake, was pleased. She made a brief remark about Uchiha Izuna's age that was consistent with her general aesthetic preferences. Her children had spent considerable effort persuading her to follow the proper sequence of events rather than acting on her usual timeline, which would have involved considerably less preparation and considerably more immediacy.
The persuasion had held, for now.
The wedding was approaching. The world's interested parties were aware of it and positioning accordingly — Whitebeard, the Marine, anyone with a reason to care about the Kozuki bloodline or the Hyuga heritage that the match was designed to access. Cake Island was preparing to receive them all, in one capacity or another.
Momonosuke submitted to the final fitting with the bearing of someone who had decided that dignity, at minimum, was still available to him.